Whitby is a seaside town, port & civil parish in the Scarborough borough of North Yorkshire. Situated on the east coast of Yorkshire at the mouth of the River Esk, Whitby has a maritime, mineral & tourist heritage. Its East Cliff is home to the ruins of Whitby Abbey, where Caedmon, the earliest recognised English poet, lived. The fishing port emerged during the Middle Ages, supporting important herring & whaling fleets, & was where Captain Cook learned seamanship. Tourism started in Whitby during the Georgian period & developed with the arrival of the railway in 1839. Its attraction as a tourist destination is enhanced by the proximity of the high ground of the North York Moors national park & the heritage coastline & by association with the horror novel Dracula. Jet & alum were mined locally, & Whitby Jet, which was mined by the Romans & Victorians, became fashionable during the 19th century.
James Cook FRS (1728?1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, & captain in the British Royal Navy. He made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making 3 voyages to the Pacific Ocean, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia & the Hawaiian Islands, & the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager & joined the Royal Navy in 1755. He saw action in the Seven Years' War & subsequently surveyed & mapped much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege of Quebec, which brought him to the attention of the Admiralty & Royal Society. This acclaim came at a crucial moment in his career & the direction of British overseas exploration, & led to his commission in 1766 as commander of HM Bark Endeavour for the first of 3 Pacific voyages.
In these voyages, Cook sailed thousands of miles across largely uncharted areas of the globe. He mapped lands from New Zealand to Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean in greater detail & on a scale not previously charted by Western explorers. He surveyed & named features, & recorded islands & coastlines on European maps for the first time. He displayed a combination of seamanship, superior surveying & cartographic skills, physical courage, & an ability to lead men in adverse conditions.
Cook was attacked & killed in 1779 during his 3rd exploratory voyage in the Pacific while attempting to kidnap the Island of Hawaii's monarch, Kalani??pu?u, in order to reclaim a cutter stolen from one of his ships. He left a legacy of scientific & geographical knowledge that influenced his successors well into the 20th century, & numerous memorials worldwide have been dedicated to him.
James Cook was born on 7 Nov 1728 in the village of Marton in Yorkshire & baptised on 14 Nov in the parish church of St Cuthbert, where his name can be seen in the church register. He was the 2nd of 8 children of James Cook (1693?1779), a Scottish farm labourer from Ednam in Roxburghshire, & his locally born wife, Grace Pace (1702?1765), from Thornaby-on-Tees. In 1736, his family moved to Airey Holme farm at Great Ayton, where his father's employer, Thomas Skottowe, paid for him to attend the local school. In 1741, after five years' schooling, he began work for his father, who had been promoted to farm manager. Despite not being formally educated he became capable in math, astronomy & charting by the time of his Endeavour voyage. For leisure, he would climb a nearby hill, Roseberry Topping, enjoying the opportunity for solitude. Cooks' Cottage, his parents' last home, which he is likely to have visited, is now in Melbourne, Australia, having been moved from England & reassembled, brick by brick, in 1934.
In 1745, when he was 16, Cook moved 20 miles to the fishing village of Staithes, to be apprenticed as a shop boy to grocer & haberdasher William Sanderson. Historians have speculated that this is where Cook first felt the lure of the sea while gazing out of the shop window.
After 18 months, not proving suited for shop work, Cook travelled to the nearby port town of Whitby to be introduced to friends of Sanderson's, John & Henry Walker. The Walkers, who were Quakers, were prominent local ship-owners in the coal trade. Their house is now the Captain Cook Memorial Museum. Cook was taken on as a merchant navy apprentice in their small fleet of vessels, plying coal along the English coast. His first assignment was aboard the collier Freelove, & he spent several years on this & various other coasters, sailing between the Tyne & London. As part of his apprenticeship, Cook applied himself to the study of algebra, geometry, trig, navigation & astronomy?all skills he would need one day to command his own ship.